Mammalian carnivores are considered a key group in maintaining ecological health
and can indicate potential ecological integrity in landscapes where they occur. Carnivores also
hold high conservation value and their habitat requirements can guide management and
conservation plans. The order Carnivora has 84 species from 8 families in the Neotropical
region: Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Otariidae; Phocidae; Procyonidae; and
Ursidae. Herein, we include published and unpublished data on native terrestrial Neotropical
carnivores (Canidae; Felidae; Mephitidae; Mustelidae; Procyonidae; and Ursidae).
NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES is a publicly available data set that includes 99,605 data
entries from 35,511 unique georeferenced coordinates. Detection/non-detection and quantitative
data were obtained from 1818 to 2018 by researchers, governmental agencies, non-governmental
organizations, and private consultants. Data were collected using several methods including
camera trapping, museum collections, roadkill, line transect, and opportunistic records.
Literature (peer-reviewed and grey literature) from Portuguese, Spanish and English were
incorporated in this compilation. Most of the data set consists of detection data entries (n =
79,343; 79.7%) but also includes non-detection data (n = 20,262; 20.3%). Of those, 43.3% also
include count data (n = 43,151). The information available in NEOTROPICAL CARNIVORES
will contribute to macroecological, ecological, and conservation questions in multiple spatiotemporal perspectives. As carnivores play key roles in trophic interactions, a better
understanding of their distribution and habitat requirements are essential to establish
conservation management plans and safeguard the future ecological health of Neotropical
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ecosystems. Our data paper, combined with other large-scale data sets, has great potential to
clarify species distribution and related ecological processes within the Neotropics. There are no
copyright restrictions and no restriction for using data from this data paper, as long as the data
paper is cited as the source of the information used. We also request that users inform us of how
they intend to use the data.